Motorola Announces Manufacturing Balance Tool In Its Manufacturing Software Suite

Motorola offers manufacturers an additional tool to improve operating efficiency with the introduction of Manufacturing Balance at the APEX trade show this week in San Diego, California. This best-in-class production optimization tool, introduced by Motorola's Global Software Group, will determine the optimum build plan for an entire factory with unmatched speed and accuracy. Production is optimized by grouping similar products and then assigning them to the most capable lines in a manufacturing facility. These lines are then balanced to evenly distribute the workload across all machines. Manufacturing Balance provides the information required to streamline new product introductions and improve production efficiency in order to meet production and cost savings goals.

Manufacturing Balance has proven an effective tool within Motorola's manufacturing factories for the past 10 years. During that time, the product has been researched, tested and enhanced. Factories using Manufacturing Balance for production optimization have documented savings of up to 34%, which translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in each factory each month. Production cost savings for the entire corporation have totaled in the tens of millions of dollars during the tool's lifetime.

Manufacturing Balance is the third tool in Motorola's manufacturing software suite. In June of last year, Motorola announced the introduction of Manufacturing Pulse, a process monitoring tool that identifies and eliminates bottlenecks, reduces scrap and tracks productivity and SPC metrics in real-time across multi-vendor lines. October 2001 brought the introduction of Manufacturing Intellitrak, an MES application suite.

Manufacturing Intellitrak ensures improved quality and control through predictive genealogy, traceability data collection, build recipe and component verification, and defect/repair tracking. Now, with Manufacturing Balance, Motorola's Global Software Group is demonstrating how it can further benefit the electronics manufacturing industry with a proven optimization solution.